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Iranian Project Among Int'l Architecture Award Winners

Saba Apartment in the northeast of Tehran, Heravi neighborhood, is among the winners of the 2016 International Architecture Awards in Chicago.

The Chicago Athenaeum, which is an international museum of architecture and design, together with the European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies have awarded 132 new buildings, commercial and institutional developments, landscape architecture, and urban planning projects from 43 nations for this year’s edition of the awards, Honaronline reported.

Selected by an Italian jury of architects out of hundreds of submissions, the winners are to be exhibited in Istanbul, Turkey preceding the Istanbul Design Biennial, September 2-30.

Designed by a team of nine Iranian designers, Saba Apartment was completed in 2015 by architects Sara Kalantary and Reza Sayadian of The Office of Dynamic Continuity (TDC) from Iran.

The two-layer street facade of the eight-storey building includes one transparent layer and one movable wooden layer. The double layer facade facing the street prevents the heat exchange between indoors and outdoors.

The inner layer is a glass curtain of double-glazed windows providing the indoors with the daylight brightness and night time privacy in combination with the outer layer, which is formed by a set of vertical wooden shuttering on rails in front of the windows that can be arranged manually.

Deep balconies with modular flower boxes cover the back facade in greenery, which is drip-irrigated using rainwater harvested in tanks on the roof.

Using solar energy for supplying the power needed for lighting the common spaces, the energy is collected via solar panels placed on the roof and used in time of need.

Environment-Friendly Materials

The materials used in construction of the project such as wood, bricks, iron plates and stones are considered environment friendly and are acquired from local resources.

Kalantary and Sayadian are graduates of Islamic Azad University, Tehran central branch and have taught design at the same university. They established TDC in 2003.

With over a decade of experience in a broad spectrum of types and scale of architecture and addressing their corresponding needs and concerns, TDC has established itself as a progressive and dynamic contemporary practice among Iranian and international society of architectures and has won many national and international awards in architecture and interior design.

Founded in 2004, the International Architecture Awards are the largest and most extensive global program in the world, honoring projects that achieve a high standard of excellence in design, construction, planning, and sustainability.

“The selected new buildings and urban planning projects in this year’s edition demonstrate a new and growing sensitivity to true human-based design and a sympathetic approach to sustainability and the environment,” said Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, president of the Chicago Athenaeum.

“The best of today’s architecture addresses the harnessing of simple materials, structural ingenuity and unskilled labor to bring architecture to underserved communities in a simple, low-cost, low-impact, and often beautiful way,” he added.

The Istanbul exhibition where the winning projects will be displayed is entitled ‘The City and the World’ and is scheduled to travel in Europe, opening at The European Center’s Contemporary Space Athens in Athens, Greece in 2017.

A ceremony to present the winners with the awards will be held after the exhibition opens on September 2.